Hopkins in Irelandfor the Jesuit community at Boston College

Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway lookas once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers

of the belled bed beckoning across the room. He stops, recovers,takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another lookat the questions he has posed his students and the twists they tookto cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers

like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokeshim still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded markof honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensedthe same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokeslash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the dark.

Paul Mariani holds a chair in English at Boston College. His new book of poems, Deaths & Transfigurations, will be published by Paraclete Press next summer and his biography of Hopkins by Viking Press. The Rev. William Hart McNichols,